ABSTRACT
The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has ushered in a new era of both global and national disability rights advocacy, especially in the Global South. This chapter argues that the CRPD contains a "civil society mandate" founded upon Western assumptions of how disabled persons organisations (DPOs) should act and the disability consciousness and political advocacy that persons with disabilities should hold. The CRPD is the organising principle of the macro-level context that all persons with disabilities exist in. Through its article on civil society, the CRPD has globalised the expectation that both disabled individuals and their DPOs will be oriented towards rights advocacy. Developing DPOs and a disability consciousness according to the Western experience is therefore a central mission of the global disability movement that is promoting the CRPD. Several comparative studies of disability that take local context seriously point to another major difference in context – dire poverty.
